Artist Andy Warhol (American, 1928–1987)
Title Flowers
Date 1970
Medium Color silkscreen on paperboard
Dimensions Image: 37 x 37 in. (94 x 94 cm)
Sheet: 38 x 38 in. (96.5 x 96.5 cm)
Credit Line Extra, out of the edition. Designated for research and educational purposes only.
© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University
Accession Number 2013.150
About this Work
In 1964, Pop artist Andy Warhol installed a series of flower paintings in Leo Castelli’s New York City gallery based on a photograph of four hibiscus blossoms by Patricia Caulfield in Modern Photography, June 1964 (she sued him for copyright infringement). The paintings used a silkscreen matrix to repeat the same image in numerous color variations. The canvases were hung from ceiling to floor creating a wallpaper-like effect (or what one critic called “psychedelic indoor décor”). While this print is a later riff on a favorite theme, the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art also has an color offset Flower print related to the 1964 show (EMA 65.71.6).
Warhol’s choice of a floral motif evokes strong artistic and symbolic connotations. As John Smith of Andy Warhol Museum, noted: “Flowers in art and culture have been ubiquitous since the beginning of recorded art history. The floral theme wasn’t any more exhausted when Warhol was doing it than when 17th-century Dutch painters or the Impressionists were. But Warhol was sly; he was always playing with traditional art historical themes.” An art critic for the Village Voice said that the flowers seem to float right off of the canvas, “like cut-out gouaches by Matisse set adrift on Monet’s lily pond.”
Warhol’s Flowers look more like flattened biomorphic shapes than actual plants. Despite the blades of grass in the background, they appear disconnected from their natural world. Even more banal (and overtly decorative) than his pop culture images—such as Campell soup cans—flowers provided Warhol with a positive, marketable subject matter. To reiterate the image’s generic multiplicity and profitability, Warhol replicated it as mass-produced prints and even as fabric for a dress by Halston.
Warhol’s simple flowers became iconic of a new generation. They represented a thriving post-war consumer culture and the youthful optimism of the “flower children.” However, like the 1960s, Warhol’s happy imagery harbors a darker side. The 1964 flower pictures have been suggested as a tribute to slain President John F. Kennedy. Read in this way, they not only recall funereal flowers on a grave, but also an avocation of flowers as a symbol of life and death.
